There has been some buzz over the last two weeks about VC investments in RSS-related companies including our recent investment in NewsGator.
One company that was overlooked is MessageCast.. MessageCast was founded in late 2001 by Royal Farros, David Hodson, and Mike Rubin. My partner – Heidi Roizen – provided the seed investment (Heidi and Royal had previously worked together for a long time at T/Maker – the company that brought us the wonderful invention of “clickart”.
MessageCast provides a platform for publishers to provide their content via IM technologies – specifically MSN Alerts. Suddenly, instead of publishing via email, content providers can cause an MSN Alert to appear on your screen. This – of course – is only opt-in – so you (the user) have complete control (and LiveMessage is completely CAN-SPAM compliant).
“Why should the RSS world care” you ask? MessageCast is in beta on their MessageCast Syndication Edition for RSS publishers. To try it – if you are an MSN Messenger user – simply click on my LiveMessage link right here or on the top right side of my blog under Syndicate Me.
Now – MessageCast won’t be a replacement for your RSS reader (hopefully it’s NewsGator or NGOS Web / Mobile / POP / Media Center Edition). Instead, you’ll use MessageCast for your urgent feeds – the one’s you want to know about the minute they are posted. MessageCast is provided to the publisher as a service – no software is required and it takes less then five minutes to configure for an RSS feed.
Give it a try and give me feedback on what you think.